Is Netflix's 'Castlevania' Show the 'Best F--king Video Game Adaptation Ever Made'?

A very special and important piece of news pertaining to video games, vampires and televised entertainment arrived on Monday: an animated Castlevania series is coming to Netflix this year. It sounds exceptionally badass.

"I personally guarantee that it will end the streak and be the western world’s first good video game adaptation," said producer Adi Shankar on Facebook. The guy has a long history with fanboy-ifying existing properties, often via animation, and putting the results on YouTube.

Collider spoke with Shankar, who took his Castlevania x Netflix guarantee one step further: "I’m personally guaranteeing that this is going to be the best fucking video game adaptation ever made to date. … I’ve seen it, and it’s fucking amazing."

Shankar said in 2015 that the show would be based on 1990's Castlevania III and play out as a "super violent" miniseries that would "be dark, satirical, and after a decade of propaganda it will flip the vampire sub-genre on its head." He also told Collider back then that the team was working to "avoid the traditional sword-and-sandal orchestra cliche and use the heavy metal electro guitar vibe found in the early games." Akira, Young Justice, Ghost in the Shell and Ninja Scroll were cited as influences.

Netflix's Castlevania was penned by English comics author Warren Ellis, whose work includes a variety of X-Men and Batman books. Netflix has identified it as Season 1, Part 1, which will consist of four half-hour-ish episodes, and shared this description:

"Castlevania is a dark medieval fantasy following the last surviving member of the disgraced Belmont clan, trying to save Eastern Europe from extinction at the hand of Vlad Dracula Tepe himself."

The Castlevania games—castle-set, Bram Stoker-meets-anime, heavy on ghost/demon/monster-whipping—debuted in the U.S. in 1987 on the NES. More than 30 iterations have followed, across a slew of consoles and handhelds, with the most recent being 2014's Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2.